Les routes de l’insomnie. Polisemia del viaggio nella poetica di Léopold Sédar Senghor, dal «Royaume d’Enfance» alla «Civilisation de l’Universel»
Author(s)
Mattioli, Masha
Date Issued
May 22, 2015
Type
Doctoral Thesis
Abstract
Senghor was among the first to give poetic expression to African experience in a European
tongue, achieving a synthesis of inspiration and means of expression that does honor to both and
betrays neither.
He used poetry as a special place for the cohabitation of different languages and cultures,
and as an instrument to map out a geography of ambivalence. As a user of a hybrid code, he tried to
orchestrate a new, personal language, by negotiating his ideal – but also real – place of world
production as a place between…, in an eternal delicate equilibrium.
Themes of notion, shifting and journey pervade Senghor’s poetry, and inspire it with an
inexhaustible dynamic energy. A new reading from this angles, underlines continous comings and
goings between Africa and the rest of the world. Moreover, a key theme of his poetics is the
sentiment of emotion, in its etymological meaning of an e-motion, to be intended as « coming from
an elsewhere », usually from one’s own self, towards some others. Senghor’s imagination still
running incessantly on the road (« They call me The Itinerant », he wrote in a poem). His poetry is
overcome by mental need of drawing back space and time limits, in a fluent continuum marked by
comings and goings toward past, present and future, not without trespassing into the hereafter,
between renascence and eternity : « I always confuse Childhood and Eden / As I mingle life and
Death – a bridge of sweetness joins them ».
According to Senghor, poetry has its own paths and special conditions, which stimulate
naming and uttering, both able to yield something fundamental : poetry, as well as journey, needs
some space, time and memory crying out to be told. As a result, travelling and writing coexist in a
simultaneous tension of creation, the journey turning into writing and vice versa.
Additional information
Dottorato di ricerca in Storia e cultura del viaggio e dell'odeporica nell'età moderna
File(s)![Thumbnail Image]()
Name
mmattioli_tesid.pdf
Size
504.8 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
566af4519a76a3ebf2e787c58cacead2